Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

November 15, 2016

Google's fake news link

'Don't trust Google' is something I say a LOT. Here's another example. If you go to the search engine and do a search for 'final election results' this is what you'll see. Well, maybe you'll see it, maybe you won't, depending on where you live, what you search, if you had eggs for breakfast and the colour of your eyes:

Clearly shows that the results are 61,039,676 to Clinton and 60,371.193 to Trump. Now, figures are still not entirely finalised I understand, so the result obviously isn't going to change (and that's decided by the electoral college anyway, not the popular vote).

However, underneath this result is this:

Now, I couldn't get exactly that myself, but on my iPad I was able to see this version:

Now, the site in question is 70news, and the figures that it quotes are simply not true. if you look at their website - I'm not linking, but you can find it at 70news then dot and then wordpress.com/ - you see this:

This figure is still wrong and none of what is said there is right. It's not clear just WHY Google has decided to link to this site, particularly so given that they so recently said that they were going to be fact checking the news! If you want to know the exact results, head across to the Washington Post, which currently has the figures at 61.32 for Clinton and 60.54 for her opponent. A rather different situation. Once again - and I'm sure we can all do this now, so one, two, three, "DON'T TRUST GOOGLE"